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61 9 R Raasay The wind was still blowing briskly and a light rain was falling when I boarded a small ferry to Raasay the next morning. My car and one other were aboard, and the number of passengers was only six, including a small child. I was weary; my back was hurting from too-soft beds, a common problem on this trip. The pillows everywhere were worse. The matter of heating was interesting, to put it mildly. It had been cool or cold every night, and my rooms had gotten progressively chillier. Most innkeepers turn off the heat from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. or so, though I can scarcely tell the difference between the heat being on and being off. Climbing into bed at night means pulling up as many covers as can be located. As a champion of fresh air I’ve gone so far as to open windows some evenings, only to turn my lodgings into a meat locker by the time I was up for the bathroom at 3 a.m. By the way, there’s a reason no one puts toilets in meat lockers; the seats are cold enough to inhibit even the most urgent needs. But I digress. It was only a fifteen-minute ride to Raasay, a place where Boswell especially had a deliciously good time. The four days he and Johnson spent on the island were among the happiest of their journey, maybe as some have suggested, the happiest of Boswell’s entire life. And Boswell’s writing has an undoubted lightness for this part of the trip, suffused with the great pleasure he felt sweeping up his imagination when he arrived on the lovely island. Readers should savor it for themselves in full, but I’ll try to offer enough samples to give a sense of Boswell’s palpable energy and exuberance. Boswell and Johnson, the latter seated high on the stern “like a magnificent Triton,” were rowed across the sound in a boat sent by John MacLeod , the laird of Raasay. The crew sang as they rowed, and the words 62 Whisky, Kilts, and the Loch Ness Monster echoed those of reapers laboring on the shore. The crossing turned rough, as usually happens. Johnson likened it to being in an open boat on the Atlantic , as the wind roared and water splashed into his face, but he held his good humor, imagining the day’s short journey compared to one across the Atlantic in an open boat and laughing at how Londoners would shudder with fear at his recklessness. Johnson at this moment hardly seemed an ailing , melancholic man of sixty-four. He and Boswell were accompanied by two marvelous companions who would be with them throughout Skye: the Reverend Donald Macqueen, a minister in the Church of Scotland, and Malcolm MacLeod of the House of Raasay, who was said to have helped Bonnie Prince Charlie escape his pursuers on this island in 1746. Boswell’s oft-quoted description of Malcolm ’s person gives us a much admired prose portrait of a keen Highlander: He was now sixty-two years of age, quite the Highland gentleman ; of a stout, well-made person, well-proportioned; a manly countenance browned with the weather, but a ruddiness in his cheeks, a good way up which his rough beard extended; a quick lively eye, not fierce in his look, but firm and good-humoured. He had a pair of brogues, tartan hose which came up only near to his knees and left them bare, a purple camblet kilt, a black waistcoat, a short cloth green coat bound with gold cord, a yellowish bushy wig, a large blue bonnet with a gold-thread button. I never saw a figure that was more perfectly a representative of a Highland gentleman. I wished to have a picture of him just as he was. I found him frank and polite, in the true sense of the word. Boswell could have done no better had he snapped a camera’s shutter. Boswell liked the view of the rocky coast with fine houses in the near ground, trees, and beyond them hills ascending into mountains. The island prompted from him rare comments on the beauty of the physical and natural world he observed. Johnson’s doubts about the expedition were quickly laid to rest, too: “We found nothing but civility, elegance, and plenty. The general air of festivity . . . struck the imagination with a delightful surprise.” On...

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